Reaction for: MI and Teaching Strategies by Amanda

First of all, I love the fact that the author decided to write about the seven intelligences. That has been my point in the discussions weve had for soooo long. This idea teach to the linguistic people among us is not new... but it is revolutionary in so far as we do not do this.

The problem is that a lot of this cannot be applied to cs. Storytelling? I guess that the easiest way to adapt that to cs is to have the students explain a topic or a design to other students. Brainstorming is very similar to the design checks that we have to do. The tape recorder idea, while great for first graders cannot be adapted to cs...until we get machines that understand language. Now, Journal Writing is an idea that we have thought of before, in fact Robert included it in the specifications of a thoughtful program... a diary of sorts. The idea is a good one. Especially for larger projects like that of Tetris. Publishing I don't think could be used without making people feel bad and with out breaching the collaboration policy.

As for the Logical-Mathematical mind. I don't think that we need to focus on such students. They seem to have no problem picking up cs with out the material being geared for them.

I think that 15 and 16 have geared the course towards the students that are visually based. They both use elaborate support code to help the students visualize the ideas behind the programs.

Now, teaching for bodily-kinesthetic intelligence raises some questions. We then have to dissect who is going to take cs. We attemps to gear cs towards the lingustic and the mathematical types. We complain that we don't attract enough people that have lingusitic backgrounds. Yet, I'm not sure that we attract ANYONE with a bodily kinesthetic intelligence. Still, everyone is supposed to have a combination of these intelligences. Should we only teach it to the intelligences that we gear it towards now? Should we try to encompass all of them? Is this idea ridiculous? Perhaps we should just forgo the rest and teach it purely to the mathematical mind. But then again, I would guess that the more ways that one understands something, the more they understand it.

And that's, uh yeah, and yeah.


Reactions


Matt C:

In my education class last semester we talked about different learning styles and teaching for those styles. One of my arguments was that CS could appeal to people with a Kinisthetic intelligence, because in some ways you can get the computer to do the acting or motion for you. When teaching Logo, a robot was often hooked up and moved around. Karel the robot works sort of the same, except on screen. I believe that our graphical approach is somewhat geared so that Kinesthetic learners can benefit, not just visual learners. And as both Shoe and I have mentioned, the linked-list demo is supposed to be appeal to this style as well. So I don't think that we leave Kinesthetic learners out, and in fact I think we can often appeal to them the way we currently teach, and could so even more with different exercises.


MY NAME: Matt Amdur

MY COMMENTS: While it is nearly impossible to implement every teaching style in one class, I do think that we can cover a number of bases. Lecture deals with those people who learn by hearing and seeing, section could cater to people who have bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, or people who learn best by working with other people, and TA hours take care of people who learn by asking one on one questions. It seems that the intro courses provide many different opportunities for students to learn the material, and since most people can learn more than one way, I don't feel were leaving that many people out.


Jon Moter:

You can't do storytelling? I think the skits are definitely a method of storytelling we use. Admittedly, the purpose of them is more to be amusing than educating, but we are very careful that the skits that are based on programming (Great Tragic Love Stories, Slush Grey) have a script that for the most part conceptually matches up with the programming concepts. :-)


Danah:

I would say that we focus too much on linguistically minded individuals and need to focus more on others. Given, there are some unused and interesting techniques in teaching linguistically minded individuals but I think we need to focus on others, such as musical!


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